Bank Holdings and Systemic Risk

Abstract

The recent financial crisis has focused attention on identifying and measuring systemic risk. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to estimate the portfolio composition of banks as function of daily interbank trades and stock returns. While banks’ assets are reported to regulators and/or the public at relatively low frequencies (e.g. quarterly or annually), our approach estimates bank asset holdings at higher frequencies which allows us to derive precise estimates of (i) portfolio concentration within each bank—a measure of diversification—and (ii) common holdings across banks—a measure of market susceptibility to propagating shocks. We find evidence that systemic risk measures derived from our approach lead, in a forecasting sense, several commonly used systemic risk indicators.